Editing Spacing effect (section)

===Advertising===
The spacing effect and its underlying mechanisms  have important applications to the world of advertising. For instance, the spacing effect dictates that it is not an effective advertising strategy to present the same commercial back-to-back (massed repetition). Spaced ads were remembered better than ads that had been repeated back to back.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book|title=The Psychology of Advertising|last1=Fennis|first1=Bob|last2=Stroebe|first2=Wolfgang|publisher=Psychology Press|year=2010|isbn=978-0203853238|location=Hove|pages=104}}</ref> Layout variations presented in short spacing intervals also resulted in improved recall compared to ads presented in exact repetition.<ref name=":1" /> The same effect was also achieved in a study involving website advertisements. It was revealed that sales diminish progressively as the customer visited the site and was exposed to the ad several times. However, if the elapsed time between the visits was longer, the advertisement had a bigger effect on sales.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Handbook of Marketing Decision Models, Second Edition|last1=Wierenga|first1=Berend|last2=Lans|first2=Ralf van der|publisher=Springer|year=2017|isbn=9783319569390|location=Cham|pages=193}}</ref> If encoding variability  is an important mechanism of the spacing effect, then a good advertising strategy might include a distributed presentation of different versions of the same ad.

Appleton-Knapp, Bjork and Wickens (2005)<ref>{{cite journal | doi = 10.1086/432236 | volume=32 | title=Examining the Spacing Effect in Advertising: Encoding Variability, Retrieval Processes, and Their Interaction | year=2005 | journal=Journal of Consumer Research | pages=266–276 | last1 = Appleton-Knapp | first1 = Sara L.| issue=2 }}</ref> examined the effects of spacing on advertising. They found that spaced repetitions of advertisements are more affected by study-phase retrieval processes than encoding variability. They also found that at long intervals, varying the presentation of a given ad is not effective in producing higher recall rates among subjects (as predicted by variable encoding). Despite this finding, recognition is not affected by variations in an ad at long intervals.